GVU's 3rd WWW User Survey

GVU runs the surveys as PUBLIC SERVICE and as such,
ALL RESULTS ARE FREE (subject to certain terms and conditions).

This is the home page for the
Graphic, Visualization, & Usability Center's
(GVU) 3rd WWW User Survey.
The 3rd survey was run from April 10th 1995 through May 10th 1995 and was endorsed by both
the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
Over 13,000 unique responses were collected to five sets of questionnaires, including: General Demographics,
WWW Browser Usage, Authoring Information, Consumer Attitudes & Preferences and a pre-test directed towards
Web Service Providers. This page provides access to the following:

We've released the
collected datasets
and have made most material available via anonymous ftp via ftp.cc.gatech.edu in
/pub/gvu/www/survey/survey-04-1995.
We appreciate your patience - all good work takes time - especially since Colleen and I
do all survey related undertakings in our spare hours.

Analyzes of the data for the Third Survey resulted in many interesting findings. Overall,
we observed substantial shifts in the demographics of the users who filled out the first two
surveys and the third. The users in the Third Survey represent less and less the "technology developers/
pioneers" of the first survey (primarily young, computer savy users) and more of what we refer to as
the "early adopters/seekers of technology." The adopters are not typically provided access to the Web
through work or school, but actively seek out local or major Internet access providers, like Prodigy.

Why all this mentioning of Prodigy?

Due to an agreement between the Hermes team (they develop and analysis the consumer attitudes
questionnaires) and Prodigy (the first major online Internet access provider to enable Web access), a
link to the surveys was placed on Prodigy's Web entry page for 10 days during the surveying period.
This provided us with the ability to compare Prodigy's users to users in general - the first comparison of these two populations
that we know of. Additionally, we stratified the respondents by location (Europe & USA)
and gender (Women & Men) and performed statistical tests for differences between groups.

What's the average age?

One category that has changed considerably over time is age. The mean age for the Third Survey is
35.01 (median 35.00), up almost four years from the Second Survey. Also, only 30.44% were
between the ages of 21 and 30, compared to 56% of the respondents for the First Survey.
We observe no statistically significant differences across gender for age
(average age for women is 35.15 years old vs 35.05 for men).

What's the gender ratio & how has this changed over time?

As for gender, 15.5% of the users were female, 82.0% male and 2.5% chose to "Rather not say!" Compared to the
Second Survey, women represent a 6% increase and men a 8% decrease. Compared to the
First Survey in January of 1994, this represents a 10% increase for women and 12% decrease
for men. This trend is quite linear (R Squared .98) and suggests an even male/female
ratio could be achieved during the first quarter of 1997. Granted, it would be nice to have
more data points to increase the confidence of these predications (it's a good thing
we started the surveys when we did). In summary, there exists a trend for the Web
towards older users and towards more balanced gender ratios.

Also, we note that in the US, 17.1% of the users were female, 80.3% male and 2.6% chose
to "Rather not say!" For Prodigy, that ratios were even more in favor of women, with
19.1% female and 78.8% male. This four to one m/f ratio more so reflect the
proportions outside the Web and also suggest that as more major online services join
the Web and Internet,
more balanced female/male ratios are likely to occur. The US and Prodigy ratios also
indicate that the US is integrating women more quickly into the user population than
other parts of the world.

What's the average and median income?

The overall median income is between $50,000 and $60,000 US dollars, with an estimated
average income of $69,000. European respondents continue to lag in income, with an average
income of $53,500 US dollars. Prodigy users' income is the highest of all sampled groups,
with a median income in the range of $60,000 and $75,000 and an estimated average income
of $80,000 US dollars.

What about location, marital status, & occupations?

For classification by major geographical location, 80.6% of the respondents were
from the US, 9.8% from Europe, and 5.8% from Canada and Mexico, with all other major
geographical locations begin represented, but to a lesser degree. Step towards replicating the
survey in other continents and providing some multilingual support might alter these
differences. Overall, 50.3% of the users are married, with 40.0% being single. The users who
reported being divorced was 5.7%. Occupation wise, Computer-related fields (31.4%) and Education-related fields (including
students) (23.7%) still represent the majority of respondents.
Professional (21.9%), Management (12.2%), and "Other" occupations (10.8%)
fill out the other categories. 82.3% of the respondents are white, with none of
the other groups reporting over 5% of the responses. In summary, the respondents are
typically white, married, North American, with computer or educational occupations.

How willing are users to pay for access to Web sites?

Overall, 22.6% of the respondents stated outright that they would not pay fees to access
material from WWW cites. This is the same ratio as observed in the 2nd survey. Additionally,
there were no statistically significant differences found between the Prodigy and
non-Prodigy response distributions for this question. This implies that as the Web increases
its user base, we'd expect to continue to find a 20% negative response to paying for access to
Web sites. The distribution of primary computing platforms across all sampled populations closely
resembles computer marketing reports: 52.0% Windows, 26.2% Macintosh, & 8.8% Unix.
These three platforms account for 87% of all platforms reported.

WWW Usage & Preferences

How often do people use their Web browser?

While our survey does not answer the question, "How many Web users are there?" it does
provide insight into potentially more interesting areas like why people use Web and in
what manner. Overall people spend a considerable amount of time on the Web, with 41%
of the users report using their browser between 6 and 10 hours/week and
21% between 11 and 20 hours/week, an increase of 5% and 6% since lst October.
Over 72% responded that they use their Web browser at least once a day!
These findings are very encouraging to services like electronic news that
attempt to provide daily content - the audience is tuned-in and present.

Why do people use their Web browser?

The most common use of browsers is simply for browsing (82.6%) followed by entertainment
(56.6%) and work (50.9%). The category with the least number of responses is shopping (10.5%).
More users from Europe primarily use their browsers for academic research than users in
the US (45.1% vs. 32.6%).

What do people do with their Web browser and with what regularity?

The following questions were scored on a
1 (never) to 9 (regularly) scale. The most popular activity for using Web browsers is to
replace other browsers (6.7) like FTP, Gopher, etc. Other categories include accessing:
reference information (6.2), electronic news (5.7) and product information (5.1). Thus,
we find support for the notion the Web browsers are becoming the default interface to the
Internet. The least frequently cited activity for using their Web browser is shopping (2.9),
which may very well be due to the lack of merchandise on the Web and ubiquitous secure
payment schemes. Interestingly, these responses are quite similar to those from the Second Survey.
For more on the consumer attitudes and preferences, see: the
Consumer Surveys portion of the User Surveys,
which were developed and analyzed by the Hermes team.

How likely are people to archive documents found of the Web?

In general, users print and save documents with approximately the same regularity (3.9 for print
and 4.5 for save). These numbers are right around the "Sometimes" option (4.5), which indicates
that not many documents are archived off the Web. This finding is supported by the
research done by Catledge & Pitkow on Web Browsing Strategies (See:
Third WWW Conference Proceedings
maintained by Elsevier Science B.V), which observed low archiving rates for actual users.

How fast are people's connection to the Internet?

The most common connection speed is 14 Kb/sec (43.8%) followed by 10 Mb/sec (13.1%).
This uneven distribution is a result of the Prodigy users, 73.2% of which have 14.4 connections,
and those which have connections provided via work or school.

Information Providers/HTML Authors

How easy was it for people to learn HTML & how did they learn it?

Good news - HTML, the markup language used for writing Web documents is easy to learn.
Most users (82.0%) spent between 1 and 6 hours learning HTML. Many users learned HTML in
only 1 to 3 hours (55.2%).
CGI was rated the most difficult (5.0) followed by FORMS (4.0), ISMAP (3.9), and HTML
overall (2.5). Interestingly, none of these averages are near the maximum difficulty rating of 9.0.

How did users learn about HTML?

On-line documentation was consulted by 88.4% of users in learning HTML. The next two most popular
sources, books and friends, were consulted by only 29.2% and 25.2% of users, respectively
(respondents were allowed to choose more than one answer).

When queried about charging for advertising on their site,
the vast majority of Webmasters replied that the question was "Not Applicable" (70.6%) or that
they "Don't Allow Ads" (24.0%) for a total of 94.6%.
For those that do allow ads, the largest percentage (3.25%) charge under $50 per week. Only
0.36% charge over $510 per week.

What about HTTP servers?

As far as HTTP servers, the most popular server is NCSA's (38.6%) followed by MacHTTP (20.8%)
and CERN's (18.5%). In Europe, however, the most popular server is CERN's (34.9%).
Only a small percentage of sites operate a proxy server (12.6%) and
most HTTP servers do not mirror other sites (91.5%). The most common server connection
speed is 10 Mb/sec (32.3%). The next most common are 1 Mb/sec with 18.0% and 56 Kb/sec with 14.1%,
indicating ample throughput to the Internet for over half of the HTTP servers (the bottle
neck is on the client side).